Monorhyme

Monorhyme poem

A monorhyme poem is when a poem uses the same end rhyme in each verse or even the same end rhyme for the whole poem.

Read the following poem, 'Silent Silent Night' by William Blake (1863). What can you notice about its rhyme scheme?

The poem 'Silent Silent Night' by William Blake is an example of a monorhyme poem.

Monorhyme rhyme scheme

A monorhyme rhyme scheme will be groups of repeated rhymes for either small sections or for the whole poem. For example, a monorhyme poem's rhyme scheme could be AAAA BBBB CCCC DD or AAA AAA AAA.

In Silent Silent Night, Blake uses an identical rhyme for each verse. Because of this, we can say that the rhyme scheme is AAA BBB CCC (each line of each stanza ends in an identical rhyme) and, therefore, the poem is in monorhyme.

Monorhymes and Identical Rhyming

Let's take a look at each individual verse of Blake's 'Silent Silent Night'.

Verse 1

The final word of each line ends in 'ight' ('Night'; 'light'; 'bright'). These words are identical rhymes because they share the same sound / ai / and end in the same consonant / t /.

Verse 2

The identical rhyme contains the sound / ei / ('day'; 'stray'; 'betray') and ends with the same consonant, the letter y.

Verses 3 and 4

Now look at the last two verses, can you identify the monorhyme in each of them?

In verse 3, the monorhyme contains the sound / i: / ('sweet'; 'deceit'; 'meet') and the same final consonant, 't'.

In verse 4, the monorhyme contains the sound / ɔɪ / ('joy'; 'destroy'; 'coy') and the same final consonant, 'y'.

Earlier examples of Monorhyme

Monorhymes also appear in earlier works by Shakespeare and John Donne.

Shakespeare uses monorhyme in a riddle that the Prince of Morocco reads out from a scroll in the Merchant of Venice:

As you can see, every line rhymes identically, the final words all ending in '-old' or '-oll'd' (inscroll'd).

Shakespeare uses monorhyme during a speech in The Merchant of Venice where every word on the end of a linerhymewith '-old.'

John Donne uses monorhyme in his satirical 'letter-poems' (or epistolary satire) sent to friends and fellow poets; in the example below he regrets his loss of inspiration:

Unlike Shakespeare's riddle in the previous example, Donne's 'letter', or poem, is divided into stanzas of 3 lines, each of which shares a rhyming sound in the last word: 'profess', 'retiredness', and 'fallowness' in the first stanza, 'shown', 'grown', and 'sown' in the second stanza, and so on.

In the opening verses Donne retains the identical rhyme. However, due to necessity or experimentation, as he progresses (the poem runs to 12 stanzas in total) he resorts to less identical rhymes:

'Religion' in the first line and 'discretion' in the second line share the same ending '- ion'. However, although the end rhyme of the second line, 'none', sounds the same, it is non-identical in its end spelling.

This occurs again in another verse, and then becomes more noticeable in the 10th stanza:

The spelling is again non-identical: 'roam' does not share the same ending with 'home' and 'become'. Furthermore, 'home' does not really sound like 'become'.

This gradual change to non-identical rhyme might also have been deliberate, to emphasize his loss of inspiration.

Later Examples of Monorhyme

If you look back at the examples by Blake and Shakespeare to see how many syllables there are in each line, you will see that Shakespeare uses seven, while Blake only five.

Now compare with the number of syllables used per line in the following excerpt from William Gay's (1865-1897) 'The Sorrowful Fate of Bartholomew Jones'.

In this passage:

• The first stanza has eleven syllables in the first two lines, and twelve in the third.
• The second stanza has ten + ten + twelve syllables.
• The third stanza returns to eleven syllables per line.

The poet has allowed himself flexibility in the number of syllables while maintaining rhythm and pace (try reading the stanzas out loud to see!)

After Bartholomew Jones dies, he goes to heaven but finds it all very dull - nothing but gold pavements, harps and angels, and constant sunshine. He complains that he would have been better off sinning when he was alive:

Monorhymes have been used for serious as well as satirical poetry. Here is an extract from a monorhyme poem about nature by Mary Electa Adams, where she describes a setting sun:

Notice how the number of syllables changes from nine to ten yet maintains rhythm.

The poet switches the syllables to ten and eleven syllables a line a few stanzas later:

The poem's closing stanza contains three lines of eleven syllables each:

The monorhyme is perhaps among the more flexible types of poetry and is useful for humorous and philosophical poetry as well as riddles. It might not appeal to everyone (and has been called mere doggerel!) But it can add pace and rhythm to a poem, thereby enriching the reader's experience and understanding.